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CW: BDSM and sexual content. Monsters Under the Bed How nervous I am to fall asleep and meet the roulette of nightmares. The only thing I am good for is running, a murderess of peace under the cloak of night. You say you will meet me in my dreams —firm and demanding— the true nature of a dominant. Eyelids flutter closed and for the first time in months, fears tuck away under the bed… afraid those hands will drag them away by the neck. Consequences of 50 Shades Women are orgasm factories in romance novels. Cuming with a filthy little glance. In real life, we work for the crown and we work hard. Playing teacher, hoping for students who wish to be our pet. To the left, not so hard, a little harder. I won’t break, you know. Please no, not another college fuck. No…I didn’t get off… Just lay there and play with my titties while I work— watch me, observe the master. Fan My Flames Tell me how delicious I am, dripping, like ice cream from the cone on a hot summer’s day. Be greedy, insatiable. A begging, wandering dog feasting upon a buffet spread across city streets. Lift my body to your mouth by the handful, and devour every morsel I have to offer. Business Casual Thong swishes between ass cheeks, down the hall I glide. Breasts exposed, just enough to tempt employee handbook guidelines. Fabric brushes ass begging your hand, just one good spank, and that low voice telling me what a naughty fucking girl I’ve been. Late Night Snacking Chocolate smears to stain sheets and I know it requires the wash/dry cycle. Too lazy to strip the bed I’ll sleep in my mess. It’s never blood, not from this body. This frozen state sits so nice. Bound, legs folded beneath. Good girl. Waiting for a command. Except there is never any command to give that can be followed. Aimee Nicole is a chronically ill, queer poet currently residing in Rhode Island. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Roger Williams University and has been published by various lit mags. Her first collection Daily Worship was published by Laughing Ronin Press early 2022 and her second collection Panoramic will be released in April by Curious Corvid Publishing. Feel free to follow her on Instagram @aimeenicole525 for awkward selfies and pictures of her cat.

Condensation convolutes my vision making it hard to see the fog-blooming tree. The crow flies up it (as the crow flies) and seeks a perch on its uppermost bough. The tree barren, surrounded by malignant ultramarine skies seems to be as isolated, as alone as I am. The corvid wings aflap rise to it as if to signal its demise under darkening thunder-dense skies. But it and I and I and it will fight to live and live to fight as long as we see fit.

The Widow Courage is a centrifuge, an open mouth, a subterranean subterfuge, a shoe untied. Where are his glasses? I ask no one. Alone is a trip made of symmetry, a crucible, a flattery of open books, a paused embrace. Just one apparition could send me spinning unbalanced by scarlet buttons or bad brakes, a simple distillation of elemental forces in solution, behind veils, eyes beneath coins. Does the dog know who will shovel the snow? I ask the pearls in the mirror around my neck. Monday is an alien destiny of disgust and fascination, both leaning on each other like bookends, a shiva, but altogether better than Sunday, a windowless room in a pine house. Tuesday is an earthquake, and the landfill cracks open to reveal a stratum of waste from 1970, all things suddenly out of season. Who can pull weeds from around the squash? Thursday is another day, as if the comet’s tail might sweep the kitchen floor. The archeologist arrives to explain the pain in shades of newsprint, nail polish, and guacamole, in which he uses a twisting logic to say it is indeed from Spain, and the lack of sunlight has preserved the color of my spleen, swollen with poison and a sort of sheen, like a Yiddish proverb. I am a banquet for the birds. Once around the block, please. Losing the Better Part of Us Because a flower turns around at night it needs the tears of hindsight to see the mind of infinity flare, blowing out in a flash of wit your life unabridged, and me shifting in that feral wind to meet every movement, all the passions like wildfire, tilted up to the sky to try and find you night after night, missing you, a twilit castaway— petals on a savage river, or the zest of your skin flying up inside the numbing starlight, answering yes, always yes, to the life we created becoming the pink upon the mist, never needing to look back because the tides have stopped, and the clouds have fled from the blue, until only the river stones beneath our bare feet, a Stellarum Fixarum, come together the same at the beginning as at the end. I reach through the swash to hold you again, in the midst, your phantom gaze bearing me thunderstruck, into being by the high of counting every follicle on our newborn child’s head, and then all the moments in between rush passed us in a blur of grief, but also wonder, and the stories of our passage, our arrival here without you on this plain of feathers, scales, hairs, and flowers, mix with fear, desire, rancor, and doubt, more than any tree might contain in root, leaf, or bark, or any church might burn in wax to loft the prayers and wishes of bringing you back, all of us wicks bending flame in the Harmattan breeze, to gently wipe clean your dour end with some new diluvial fever of birth, a pure poem of providence, of animal spirits and celestial virtue, a primeval brume rolling down my face in beads in another race to the strand to find the beach pebbles end again at the start. Our Poor Circulation Don’t wake the baby again by dredging my body of sleep, her polite icicle dream bits float barefoot in the pumping snow rolling under the door awake now gasping bold pleas for warm milk. My cold feet with distant kid fears closing the smallest pores— our refrigerator and television hum clear to preserve the eggs and stories, far-flung choices and memories pickled by simple human voices murmuring the echo of endless need. Her tiny hands reach out for cathedral air on pale lumps of skin, fleshy triggers that set hunger adrift. My breasts are under the Moon and full of godly ichor. A pair of half-frozen hosts as patient as stained glass, they suffer glacial hours of cell division swelling seesaw like weal and woe, thawing, eroding, blinking the distance of years away, recalling hairy faces beaming, empty with bald lust, the men who tried to love me like curling black smoke from old wiring, sparking clutters of wild fascination abruptly whipping tongues of flame into a bright Ferris wheel of abandon, who then left my bed of williwaw rushing out into the blizzard of brides and wives, as fathers must. Mikal Wix grew up in South Florida, of green-thumbed, hydrophilic parents. The place seeded insights into many outlooks, including the visions of a revenant from the closet. He studies literature and anthropology and has recent words in the Penumbra Literary Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Angel Rust Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Hyacinth Review, & works as a science editor.

Halfway Through Maybe it has to be this way. All these griefs passing through just to make a sharp left turn or even a sudden stop. We just keep on wheeling and pushing each other away just for it to come back again—now, a little closer—No one really wants to leave without packing or checking twice or to simply leave a tip just to make themselves feel good for moving. No one really knows how to close a passenger door and the driver’s door seems stuck. No one’s really driving. We’re just sitting several inches away each time it comes back hoping for a slight effortless movement; a sigh, maybe with a smile, and then it’s either leaving or holding, but things might not be the same again. And it has to be this way, where I’m only halfway through the trip, but always, cherish. I Am a Tree, I Am Not I just want to live / like speaking with trees / I just want to stand tall like a pine tree / I want people to admire me / use me / when they needed it so badly / I just want to be still / I just want to be here / I just want to bleed as I breathe / I just want it still / like don’t let it in with no intention to keep it / I just want silence / I know who I am when I’m alone / I just want softness / I want to drown in your hands / fill myself with waters / nourish myself / then embrace / Embrace it / And when somebody came to notice / I am a hundred years old pine tree / I want someone to cut me in half / count the rings inside the bark / name each of them as if naming their own child / like faking my own death / Everything seems beautiful in covers / but I don’t want to be speaking with trees / I don’t want to be faking my death / I just want to be here / every day / knowing I’ll make it / to midnight. Outside, Searching There is beauty in the little lights of bulbs when you finish gardening the garden and you walk home heavily, but all you see are the little lights— hanging across each tree leading you towards the exit. You can always go back. But always remember to come home, they said it’s not always safe to be outside. Although I doubt it. I have courage for the eternal. I want it, deeply. Anyone Can Hurt Anyone I am a woman born not knowing I was born. A woman who writes poetry, who speaks through complicated metaphors because I can’t seem to have everything wrapped up accordingly. I wanted it messy, it helps me feel like I’m more, like not alone, like something else, like I’m more than just a mess. I write about things, like how everyone just wanted to be everything they are not because society is space. They wanted everything, they wanted cupboard, clock, chairs, and window. They wanted a queen size bed, not anything lesser than that. They wanted all the blank spaces. They wanted to rule everything, fill every corner of this earth with space. This society isn’t my kind of space. Space can’t seem to fill itself with me, but I guess it's fine. Because I’ve learned to lay myself barefoot down in the grass and look up. I see myself, inherited by the moon and stars and the sun. You could not even imagine the rain I managed to carry without letting society know. Now you know why weather prediction is not always accurate, why space should stop predicting and expect something when they haven’t even learned how to stare at the sky. Because what is sky without a silhouette? What’s earth without the rain, the sun? What’s food without one to eat, and chair without one to sit? Let's just stop pretending to be anything. Let's just stop expecting it to happen. Because it hurts you, it hurts me. Anyone can hurt anyone.

Sometimes the urban coyotes would jump her fence and piss on the trunk of her Japanese Pine; sometimes they would rub their faces on the gnarled stems of the aloe yucca. It was common practice to alert the neighborhood on the Nextdoor app. Coyote sightings generated a certain amount of commotion. In a sense, they had transformed from residents to animal control officers, always keeping watch. She remembers reading a strange urban coyote story from “The Daily Dish” in The Atlantic many years ago. The writer had found dead house cats on her lawn; their bellies had been sliced down the middle, and all the organs were placed to the side. The carcass had been licked as clean as a bowl. Or an empty womb. It seems her friendships have been sliced, rearranged, and licked clean from the bowl of her life, small, feral sphere that it is. CANDICE KELSEY is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (2020) and won the Two Sisters Writing Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Prize.

70 chairs history hangs in this square it rests in the iron and bronze and loiters in between the memories of the abandoned furniture, suitcases, bodies of those deported and murdered. Now, 70 over - sized chairs hovering on wooden plinths seat 70000 souls. Immortalised. It is a silent place but you can hear their voices shouting you hear them shouting everywhere echoing through the mouths of the living. Those mothers, leaving push-chairs at the border the tram drivers who will charge nothing families opening their homes to those crossing the border driven from their own. The heroes of Heroes Square. sunflower seeds Take these seeds tear - shaped, tender put them in your pocket and when you lie down upon this earth the seeds will sprout - remember Clytie, though betrayed still she grew no need for food and water. These too will stand proud turning their faces to follow Helios’ chariot across the sky bright heliotropes each of your thousand florets is their own sun Each a bright hope A metamorphosis. how to fly a kite for Persephone Some vernal morn uproot your toes replant them one by one in viridescent fields pluck a poppy’s heart - pin it to a breeze and fly it in the blue to P e r s e p h o n e

I’m an eccentric oddball, not even my attire fits in. I dress in the dark in my wardrobe, doors shut and eyes closed. Groping in shadow, I put on whatever I touch. incongruous colors and patterns. Clothes on backwards. Or upside down. This is my solemn confession: I’m horribly shy. Now my secret is unveiled. Now I am out of the closet. Nolcha (she/her) has always written, starting with poop and crayons on the walls. Her poems were published in WyoPoets News, Duck Head Journal, Ancient Paths, Dark Entries, The Red Lemon Review, Agape Review, Bullshit Literary Magazine, Storyteller’s Refrain, Wilder Literature, Paddler Press, the 2022 WyoPoets chapbook Emergence, Gone Lawn, Levatio’s first issue Serenity, Spirit Fire Review, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. My Father’s Ghost Hates Cats: Poetry for Stumbling Through Life

Albatross And what came from all that we had / I stay cocooned in piano keys, waiting for someone to come and bring music to me, even though I have the tools / the keys remain untouched and so do I / the piano stays in the desolate part of the room in an even more desolate house / beyond this house is something in which I cannot comprehend / Please never let me get sentimental Keep all of my fundamentals confidential Store There is always an ebb and flow of being okay Yesterday I almost broke down— crying – on the way to the store And by night fall I was king of my bedroom The Devil Comes Around In The Winter 1. My robe rests in downtown cities; To attain full peace is deemed far away My robe rests in Brussels; Where chocolates are formulated to induce great pleasure in the people My robe rests in the plains of Alberta; Where I dream to travel to like it’s not a big deal My robe rests in cold fruit Where cold fruit replaces warm fruit; I don’t feel like throwing it back up My robe rests in government offices; Where I don’t have to be there to take a handout My robe rests in the Middle East; Where I can be sent back to see how traditional the work can be My robe rests in old tax forms; Where I am scared to move forward; it is easier to fall down than to stand up My robe rests in the disease of the left side of my body; I get palpations from thinking because I have too many speeding tickets 2. Should I choose to indulge, Would you stop me before it's too late? Should I choose to inject lead, Would you shove erasers down my throat? Should I choose to give it all up for that girl, Would you take me to the park to do something else? Should I choose to reach for hell, Would you grab my wrists and pull? Should I choose to lay in smoke, Would you throw water on me or gasoline? Would you leave me for something better, Should I promise not to cry about it? 3. It doesn't matter If I run out of mints now- I'll sleep good tonight But things won’t be fresh At all Rami Obeid is a writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His work has been published across multiple online and print publications. His chapbook “Marooned on the Shores of Malaise” is currently available from Whispering Wick Chapbook Press. You can follow him on twitter @obeid_ro

In the first place, I resented everyone and his neighbor commenting on or even seeming to concern himself with my soul or lack of one. And I didn’t like their terms, either. At the time, I didn’t know to ask myself if I was in a nest of Gnostics, if that’s what all academics really were, or not. Or whether that was bad or good; or indifferent? And even less did I like being accused of idolatry, which was a sin; my discomfort with this was mystifying, since, even though I knew what it was supposed to be, it shouldn’t have bothered me: I wasn’t a Catholic, and wasn’t really a Christian, though I’d been raised in a Protestant milquetoast version of Christianity. This sounds confused, doesn’t it? But even though Aidan and I had thought (or at least I had thought) that our affair was a secret, not only from his wife but from everyone else of note at the university, it seemed a little too coincidental to me that my professors (only the male ones) were putting their efforts in class into a kind of preaching, when it was a clearly non-religious school at least in academic terms; and when they preached about some texts, they repeatedly brought up the question of the “divine spark,” and whether or not particular people had one (and here they would meet my attentive glance in a pointed manner). Now, from the little I’ve learned since about the divine spark—from Googling, which is all my remaining sense of antagonism towards their unfairness has allowed—I know that it is supposed to reside in every human being, as the spark of God in them. That is apparently Gnostic teaching. But also, it seemed, it may be correctly awakened or may only lie dormant. They didn’t say this, however. Their disputes, which since neither I nor anyone else was contradicting them, were being carried on with themselves, strolling back and forth at the fronts of classrooms, were as to whether a person was one who had the divine spark or one who was only composed of clay. They were downright insulting. I mean, if everyone has a soul, then who were they to say I—or anyone—didn’t have one, or to imply it, just because I was screwing around with one of their colleagues’ married graduate students? And what about him, who had been the initiator, what was he, pure gold? Or clay? Were they likewise preaching at him, or since he was practicing to become one of them, were they extending him the professional courtesy of dark angels to one of their own kind? And if they were really angels of light, why not preach to him, too, or even mainly? I was eight years his junior, was under their jurisdiction in a moral sense in the in loco parentis manner; was that how proper parents acted, not taking up for and protecting their own young, but instead blaming them entirely for a scrape they’d gotten themselves into and letting the other party off scot-free? Because as Aidan had told me, his supervisor suspected something, but had simply told him to keep his nose as clean as possible. Of course, his supervisor also was a huge man who frequented the skinny-dipping reservoir where students of my age went, where I had gone several times either by myself or with a female friend; a supervisor who’d taken his own twelve-year-old son there with him in the sort of tolerance which in older sophisticated societies was usually accomplished by men taking their young or adolescent sons to a brothel or an “understanding” older woman for the night. Yeah, and so where was his spark? Was it hidden in his mound of clay? Where did tolerance for breaches of societal norms begin and end in such a place? And what were the norms? I can sketch out the terms of my own confusion regarding my adult role models in this manner now, but at the time all I knew was suffering over Aidan’s back and forth about whether he wanted to continue with me or not, his fine manipulations amounting to a sort of sadism emotionally. I was so attuned to his every movement that when he came down the stairs in the hallway outside my basement apartment, I knew from the first step whether it was he or someone else. Most of the time, I had intuitions, strange forebodings, ghastly shadows of apprehension which I now associate with the Brontë sisters’ fiction, if he wasn’t going to turn up for our mid-morning or later daytime rendezvous at all. It was a creative time, of course, because I was living in a true Romantic’s dream, bad and good both, and I had strange, prophetic dreams at night, drank more than was good for me, secretly despised him in my heart of hearts though I was faithful to a fault in external adherence, resisting every other married man who made for me in the illusion that what went for one went for all; all the Romantic contradictions were there. It was gut-wrenching, and I developed stomach issues, not Romantic except in the sense that such abuses of good sense and good health were truly part of the Romantic period, too. But it’s only now that we humorously and a little sympathetically discuss that Byron was getting portly and so lived on a diet for a while of potatoes with vinegar, believed at the time to be good for reducing. The most resounding defeat of common sense was my loyalty to my mistake when Aidan finally admitted that even though he’d been promising to leave his wife and come live with me after I graduated, he had played me false, too: because it turned out that they were simultaneously preparing for a baby. He had been impregnating her all at the same time as he had been making avowals to me. It wasn’t clear to me why I was taking his side against myself to that extent, but the weary thing dragged on until after I graduated. He even had me over to his house one summer day to meet his cat, and one night had me there for dinner, both times when his wife was away. When I thought about it logically, a new thing for me, though all the accusations about not having a soul had stung and caused damage to my sense of myself, of value for myself, one incident kept coming back to me that finally made me feel more like letting go. True, I didn’t let go willingly until he himself ended the affair, and I exacted full tribute of sympathy from my long-suffering friends who’d always colored within the lines and couldn’t understand my motives in the least. I wasn’t sure I could, except for the influence of certain old movies like Intermezzo and Casablanca. There was only one professor’s remarks, still, which touched me in a more coherent way. My female professors, of whom there were fewer in those days than there were of the men, had by and large kept their opinions to themselves and treated me with a kind of charitable distance, not even seeming to know what was going on, which indeed they might not have, as “the old boy network” was the one to refer to for information, and they too were outsiders to that. But one female professor, Lady Mary Beth Rostakovich, therefrom Oxford as a guest lecturer and one of whom the men seemed largely to be a bit afraid, knew or thought she knew something of me. And her attitude was not one of moral and preachy disapproval paired with the lust of someone after the Biblical Suzanne. She was, rather, satirically amused. That was much harder to bear. I often thought of her in the next fall after graduation, during my long, slow recovery from the extended period of emotional self-abuse. In the semester before I had graduated, the lecture class was studying Marvell and his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” the famous piece in which a poet says to his intended but reluctant lover all sorts of things ringing changes on the carpe diem theme—remarks that if she doesn’t respond more quickly, “then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,” and a passage which acknowledged that he wasn’t in the situation such that “My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and slower.” She called particular attention at the end of the class, when unexpectedly from her I got the usual professorial eyeroll of meaning, to the phrase “vegetable love.” She articulated that it was meant to convey something less than full animal and satisfying robustness, of love as of other things, and that there were even “back then” people who made fun of vegetarians as weak and watered-down. The more I thought about this, the harder it was to puzzle out: I mean, if she knew anything really about my situation, then she knew that I had been engaged in a concupiscent affair, fully physical. So, why was she advising me to get more fully involved, as the woman addressed in the poem? That woman was not my counterpart. It was only after I thought about it a little longer that I got the real point of that wry smile and the satirical but kind advice she was giving: I was in the position of the poet speaking (hadn’t I placed in a poetry contest just the year before?), and I was wasting my time with a humanly vegetal situation, whatever its carnal facts had been. She was a sudden burst of sunshine from a dark crevasse of rock to me then, as if the hillside towering above me had been split and rolled asunder and a new set of commandments given. And first and foremost was the one that I was later to find when, funnily enough, I read Dune, about not putting yourself into someone else’s power. It didn’t say “in another’s keeping,” as that was a matter more of real caring, but in someone else’s power. And I began to realize that feminism didn’t mean fucking around wherever you wanted to and expecting to get away with it just because men did too, but making self-consistent and well-reasoned decisions, however passionate or loving, about which people were fit to be in your life as trusted equals. Also, I learned that I could take my models for behavior from those positive ones of men or women either, and that just because someone wanted to make me the lump of sparkless clay didn’t mean I couldn’t, as a woman, be the Gnostic magician myself. Not that I wanted to be, but that I could be. Victoria Leigh Bennett, Resident Greater Boston, MA, born WV. Ph.D. Degrees: English & Theater. Website: creative-shadows.com, containing 8 novels & lots of articles/reviews. "Poems from the Northeast," @winningwriters, @press_roi, @thealienbuddha, @madrigalpress, @LovesDiscretion, @cultofclio. Also has 1 collection short stories. Current WIP: 9th Novel/CNF/Poetry/Fiction. Twitter: @vicklbennett, Facebook at Victoria Leigh Bennett.

voices in the hill thunder missing souls gone from these rocks strangers long gone with their tennis and their cocktails their pedigreed dogs and pleasure loving children the old court is cracked gone to weeds netless this line of green pencil makes a pine needle while the air hangs in pine smell wild hyssop hides the partridge but nightsoil intrudes old carrion too pine nuts are found lying on crystals that grace chocolate scorpions scuttling over fragments of shrapnel walking on crystal mountain walking with pockets full papier de damas allumettes du canon araq kazan marlboro export hashish du biqaa the cicadas have won the day perched on the pine bark they shriek to their brothers below in beirut in the littoral groves of umbrella pines where the old americans lie buried w v sutra was born in Africa and raised in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, borne hither and thither on the surging tides of cold war and soft power. He has been at various times a rock musician, a public health professional, and an educator. He began writing poetry during the Covid-19 lockdown. His work can be found in various online journals and at wvsutra.com . He lives and works on a horse farm on the shoulders of the Holston Mountains in East Tennessee.

Like lightning, something that flashes but no one remembers where it struck— that fucker will burn If you can find the right match. I’m trying to tell you that none of this is right. We were supposed to be happy and safe, but you wanted the cold, and now I can’t save you when they come looking for you. I didn’t know the world could be like this. The raft that was supposed to save you capsizes. The fire that keeps you from freezing leaps to the curtains, the furniture. I have one log left. I’m saving it for that perfect morning. Toast straining for freedom. Eggs that remember our names. Let me rub your feet one more time and maybe I’ll be able to walk away. Instead of walking back into the burning building. Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, Trashcans in Love, and his newest, Grief Bacon, as well as the Necro-Files novel series and the flash fiction collection Ray's Sea World. Bledsoe co-writes the humor blog How to Even, with Michael Gushue located here: https://medium.com/@howtoeven Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter. Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press. His books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in Washington, D.C.

This earth is upended, and before and before, I am wrenching your bones for blue sequins from the glass roof, icicles folded in ribbons, this statue once had wool in green cobalt – lights, the attic opens you like stone – it cannot be the mausoleum, ashes of birth are feathers torn from our skin – you harvest faces, marble as cold as the river after the smoke fell, the mannequin never had life to give to death – I do not want to know if this is the Pantheon. Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. Nominated Best of the Net 2021, and a finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk